Heroines come in all ages, races, and body types. They remind us that being a woman is different than being a girl. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, her last completed novel published posthumously in 1817, the protagonist Anne Elliot is no blushing maiden. She is well into what would at that time be considered middle age, when she becomes reacquainted with her original love, Captain Wentworth, a man she rejected years before because her family didn’t approve of him. Persuasion is both a biting satire, perhaps Austen’s most acidic, and a Cinderella story for the woman approaching autumn. Anne finally marries Wentworth, but not until she has undergone decades of character development and weathered the vagaries of fortune.
In the 1955 David Lean movie, Summertime, no less a formidable lady than Katherine Hepburn plays Jane, a secretary on a Venetian holiday. Having granted herself this vacation as a treat, she gets…
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DENISE MARSA 